During French President Hollande’s ongoing visit to India, India and France are expected to announce that they are going to enter into an agreement to import six nuclear reactors marketed by the French company Areva, which are to be constructed in Jaitapur in Maharashtra. In this article, M.V. Ramana, physicist and lecturer at Princeton University´s Program on Science and Global Security and the Nuclear Futures Laboratory, discusses three reasons for the Indian government to not enter into the agreement.
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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India recently ruled against charging different subscribers different prices for data services. In this article, Martin Ravallion, Edmond D. Villani Chair of Economics at Georgetown University, contends that we certainly need to improve access of the poor to knowledge about public services that can help them, but such efforts should be explicitly targeted at them. Relying on prevailing processes of knowledge diffusion may simply reflect and even reinforce existing inequalities.
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The Indian government recently announced its plan to make India a 100% electric vehicle nation by 2030. In this article, Mudit Chordia, a Consultant at the University of Chicago Urban Labs, discusses the viability of such a plan in the Indian context.
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Swachh Bharat Mission – the flagship sanitation programme of the Indian government – aims to make India open-defecation free by 2019. However, this has only been achieved in 17 of 686 districts so far. In this article, Bhaskar Pant outlines the key reasons due to which the government’s efforts are not being reflected in the results, and makes suggestions to increase the effectiveness of the programme.
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Interest rates in the developed economies are still at very low levels, while investors are looking for high and stable returns for their money. This article outlines an innovative proposal for financing India’s infrastructure needs via government bonds targeted at foreign investors, with returns linked to the growth rates in the country.
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The ‘Housing for all’ scheme was launched by the Government of India in June 2015, with the objective of constructing 20 million houses for the urban poor by 2022. In this article, Roshan Kishore, data journalist at Mint newspaper, presents five charts representing the current state of India’s housing sector.
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Breeder reactors have always underpinned the claims of India’s Department of Atomic Energy about generating large quantities of electricity. The first Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor was expected to start sustaining a chain reaction back in 2010, but the reactor is massively delayed, taking more than twice the expected period. In this article, M.V. Ramana, a physicist at Princeton University, outlines the history of missed targets and contends that these reactors are best regarded as failed technology, in India and elsewhere.
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Government of India’s ‘Digital India’ programme seeks to transform the country into a digitally-empowered society and knowledge economy. This column presents region-wise findings of a perception-based survey of the e-readiness of firms. While firms in west India seem to be more e-ready than those in other regions, there is tremendous scope across all firms to increase the use of information and communications technology in business activities to improve productivity.
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